Murder for the Bride Read Online Free PDF Page B

ducks and swans.
    “What next, Dil?” she asked at last.
    “Find a loose end somewhere and catch hold and hang on until something comes loose.”
    “And if there are no loose ends?”
    “There will be. Somewhere.”
    “Paris got word from Washington. No passport issued in that name. She had a passport. Bill French saw it.”
    “I saw it too,” I said. “I kidded her about the picture. That’s when she promised she’d have a new one taken. It’s gone.”
    “Maybe that was what the killer searched for in the apartment, Dil.”
    “No. He looked in places too small to hold a passport.”
    “I’m assigned to the case, Dil. It’s good newspaper stuff. Mystery killing of lovely woman. They want me to keep it alive as long as I can. If you find that loose end you spoke about …”
    “I’ll tell you. Unless by telling you I spoil my chances.”
    She looked out across the pond. “Why should I feel so afraid, Dil?” she asked in a small voice. “Why should I feel so afraid?”

Chapter Four
    I t was easy to tell Jill Townsend that I was going to find a loose end and hang on. It made me sound like a big operator. I was dramatizing myself. You do things like that. In a sense Jill was the girl with the hair ribbon watching me hang by my knees from the apple tree.
    Maybe I was kidding myself about getting hold of a loose end. I wasn’t kidding myself about the anger. That was with me. That was something I could taste.
    We fed the ducks and then walked back to where Jill had left her little car parked near the cemetery entrance. One day maybe I’d be able to go back in there and look at her grave. Not yet. Not for a long time.
    Jill dropped me off on the far side of Canal from the corner of Bourbon and she went on back to her newsroom. I walked down the shady side of Bourbon, trying to forget all the emotions twisting around inside me, trying to think it out as logically as I could. So far there were three unknown factors. One, the huge blond man; two, the tight-faced sandy guy with the sunburned nose; three, Laura’s enigmatic statement about things not being what they seem to be.
    At least there was one point of contact with the big blond man—the old doll who had lodged the complaint. I remembered her from the time when Laura had rented the apartment. I hadn’t liked her then. Now I was more certain than ever that I didn’t like her.
    I stopped in at a small bar and grill and ate a greasy hamburger. I walked to the apartment. The people on the street were suffering with the heat. Two female tourists,obviously northern schoolteachers, walked by me trying to keep up a holiday spirit. But their dresses were pasted to them and the heat had turned their faces to putty gray. One creature came mincing down the sidewalk toward me as I turned in at the sidewalk doorway to the apartment. It wore a pale blue linen suit, a man’s suit, a Panama hat. It wore a blue veil and a necklace of coral beads. The heat didn’t seem to bother it a bit. It smirked at me through the veil.
    A dime-store cardboard sign was fastened to the old lady’s ground-floor apartment door with gilt thumbtacks. I pressed the bell and heard the distant dingle of the inside bell. The door opened so suddenly that it surprised me. I hadn’t heard her approaching. The apartment behind her was dark as night. She blinked out at me. She had a small blotched squirrel-like face, surrounded by tangled masses of gray hair. Even in all that heat she was wearing a shapeless cardigan sweater over a cotton dress so faded you couldn’t tell what the original print was. I saw why she had been so soundless. Her crumpled old feet were bare.
    “I know you,” she said. “You’re her husband, ain’t you?”
    “Yes. I want to talk to you.”
    “I got nothing to say to you, Mr. Bryant. A while back, of course, before she got herself killed, I would have had a lot to say to you about her carrying on and all, but now there isn’t anything to say.”
    She started